It seems to me Dirk’s questions 4.3, 4.4, and perhaps 4.5 may be disposed of relatively quickly because not relevant. Is that so?
[4-3 How much contribution is there that comes through our epigenome (the modification of the methylation of our DNA that passes information from prior generations & that changes during our lives – and in the process changes our gene expression)? How far back does that reach?
[4-4 How much comes from before birth? In the first 1-3 years? Later? Is there any sort of regular pattern or order to it? Or is it variable from individual to individual?
[4-5 And, how much do our genes themselves play a role?]
Not so much irrelevant as off-point. Let’s look at them. Each question presumes that the channel is functioning as the originator. Examining the mechanism per se would be interesting, perhaps, but you see clearly that it cannot tell us anything about the “why” of human life, only the “how” of it.
Question 4.3 asks how much of a contribution to feelings comes from body chemistry. Question 4.4 asks the same question, sorting it into years in which it manifests. And 4.5 asks how much the physical heredity determines.
And your answer to all of it is, these are not determinants but variables of manifestation, and therefore they don’t apply to the question of how feelings, emotions, moods, shape our day-to-day consciousness.
Well, that is true. And as we indicated previously, they are interesting questions in themselves, better suited for other minds to explore. The right investigator may pull apart the process in such a way as to gain great insight. But they won’t gain insight via these questions into the larger questions we began to look at.
We began this as an investigation into feeling and emotion. It sort of morphed into a description of our 3D lives that I’d like to pursue. The whole idea of 3D-you and “external” shared subjectivity, connected by feelings, seems to me endlessly pregnant with possibilities.
And it is true that this is the sort of question you are better formed to pursue. However, let us say this: Once we set up the conceptual framework, someone asking the same questions Dirk poses in his fourth series will come to some amazing conceptual breakthroughs, because as the connective mechanism is seen in its proper context, so many fields of study peripheral to it but integrally connected to it open up.
I hear “electromagnetism” as an example of phenomena known and then suddenly seen entirely differently once the context changes.
Like that, yes. Revolutions in thinking follow revolutions in perception. Re-read that sentence. Revolutions in thinking follow revolutions in perception. They then precipitate further changes, but change in perception comes first. The flash of lightning gives you the glimpse in the darkness. After that, the properly motivated observer works to figure out what that was that he saw in the darkness.
We keep coming back to the importance of sparks in the transmission of understanding.
We do. That’s how it works. The specific spark you seem to have been constructed to convey involves the underlying non-3D world as it interacts routinely with the 3D world. You see it in a matter-of-fact way that is outside of religious dogma but inside what we might call a religious attitude. Not “spiritual” in the sense of opposition to “physical,” but “religious” in the sense of “re ligere,” re-binding, or tying things together again.
Naturally, that is the aspect of reality that we help you convey. If your center of gravity were the scientific examination of detail, we would be no less willing and able to provide access to insights, but it would be a different order of insight. It would be chemistry class instead of psychology, say, or physics instead of history. Understand, these are examples, not specifics.
You mean, they are concepts not biographical data.
That’s what we thought we said.
Now consider. We have said this many times, but we will probably say it many times more, as long as our connection lasts: Every 3D-individual is a unique window on experience, no matter the fact that in the non-3D part of the world, we are all one. To make perhaps a poor analogy, your left hand and right hand have slightly different experiences of the world, and either has an experience quite different from an internal organ’s, or from your tongue, say, or your hair. This is not by some error or deficiency in design, obviously, nor does it involve unfairness in the fact that different specializations involve and allow different kinds of experience.
Each physical sense, each facet of your mental and emotional life, each interaction between 3D-self and the larger being it is a part of, adds to the picture. Any window not occupied reduces the view, you might say. Or, put it another way, every new vantage point provides that much more nuance.
Which is why we all belong, why we all contribute, why our lives are always part of something greater, just as we often feel, even if we often doubt. But then this leads me back to a larger question, and I’m sure I’m not the only one: Why? What is the point of the whole of 3D existence, not merely for any of us, but for all of us?
“What’s the meaning of life?”
Yes. Not just of my life, of anyone’s life, but in general. You know I have always had that question in mind. It stunted my external career, perhaps, as it is hard to engage fully when you can’t quite believe in whatever it is.
Your question amounts to asking why the 3D exists, how it relates to the non-3D, what the non-3D does. (“How do they spend their time?”)
Yes. And I know it is easy to make fun of the idea of us wanting to know something so vastly beyond our scale, and yet, it is very human to want that. Religiously oriented societies have it, though their accounts may not square with each other. Carl Jung found it in the Indians of New Mexico who believed that it was their ritual that allowed the sun to rise, and that without the ritual, the world would end. People who use certain psychotropic chemicals discover a linked-ness to the world, an underlying aliveness, a meaningfulness that ordinarily they can only believe in, rather than experience. We can’t move to such experience by an act of will (as far as I know) but we can approach it by shared ritual.
Well, now here you offer a doorway for a discussion about religious and spiritual that will set some people’s teeth on edge.
Always a good thing, right? Said smiling.
Smiling, but not quite wrong. Better that hackles rise than that unwanted sleep continues.
I have always understood why people would describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” and I would agree with the sense of it as “I agree that there is more to life than materialism, but I can’t go along with the sheep who let others define reality for them.” At the same time I always felt this missed something. There was an underlying arrogance that cost something. Unconscious arrogance, but that only made it all the more resistant to correction.
“Spiritual but not religious” may be regarded as a halfway-house position for those who have left the flock they do not fit into and have not yet found the flock they do fit into. We know you are accustomed to dividing people into flock or outlier, and it is true to a degree, but not absolutely. In any given context, some are flock and some are outliers, but remember that life is many, many different contexts, and you don’t look the same – don’t function in the same way – in each.
We are happy to more closely approach the subject of what the meaning of life is, provided that you not throw away all the context we have spent 20 years providing. Everything we say or ever have said is subject to your revised opinion in light of added context; that is a good procedure. But it would be wasteful, downright stupid, to throw it all over and say, “Aha, now I see, it was all a waste of time.”
Not much inclined to do that.
No, but the difficulty in realigning so many perspectives may tempt you or some of you to do just that. “Oh, the guys were interesting for a while, but then they got into religion and lost their way.”
That is, if you go too far for someone, you may lose them.
Always a possibility. Can’t be helped. And perhaps we were not meant as more than a wake-up call for them, and their proper course is to go their own way.